Value is only created if patents are functioning as part of a system of disseminating ideas.
Imagine two possible worlds. In the first world, when you -- as an engineer -- have a particularly difficult problem in front of you, you first go to a catalogue of solutions, look up the problem, and see if there is a solution already. If so, you pay a nominal fee to the solver, incorporate it into your design, and move on to unsolved problems.
In the second world, you have the same particularly difficult problem, but there is no catalogue of solutions, so you buckle down and solve the problem yourself. Later, someone looks at your solution and declares that a portion of it is similar to something they wrote down in the big pile of disorganized ideas. You didn't know this, because looking in the big pile of disorganized ideas is a lot of work and rarely pays off, because most of the ideas are half-assed and don't really tell you anything you didn't already know. An exorbitant fee is then charged.
There may be some industries living in the first world; I can imagine that in -- say -- chemical engineering, it is very easy to organize the ways to produce chemicals by the formula of the desired end product, and that the standard for describing how to produce a chemical leads to a pretty useful solution.
Imagine two possible worlds. In the first world, when you -- as an engineer -- have a particularly difficult problem in front of you, you first go to a catalogue of solutions, look up the problem, and see if there is a solution already. If so, you pay a nominal fee to the solver, incorporate it into your design, and move on to unsolved problems.
In the second world, you have the same particularly difficult problem, but there is no catalogue of solutions, so you buckle down and solve the problem yourself. Later, someone looks at your solution and declares that a portion of it is similar to something they wrote down in the big pile of disorganized ideas. You didn't know this, because looking in the big pile of disorganized ideas is a lot of work and rarely pays off, because most of the ideas are half-assed and don't really tell you anything you didn't already know. An exorbitant fee is then charged.
There may be some industries living in the first world; I can imagine that in -- say -- chemical engineering, it is very easy to organize the ways to produce chemicals by the formula of the desired end product, and that the standard for describing how to produce a chemical leads to a pretty useful solution.
The software industry, however, isn't.